midword and chapter 4

MIDWORD

Last night I don’t know what came over me. Whether it was my longing for Lidsanel growing worse again now that I have begun to write about him, or worry about the future as the dreaded day grows closer and closer, or a bit of both, but when Aunt Lujanta came to say goodnight to me I went all to pieces and fell on her neck and told her. Everything. Every single thing.

Can you imagine anything feebler? Holding out all these months, when the wounds were really fresh and painful, and then, just as the pain had begun to ease a little and the scars to heal over, letting go and caving in like a trampled mole-hole. It makes me want to bite my fists.

She took the news very calmly – although the calmness may have applied to her outside only. All the way through the story she hardly moved, but I noticed a slight twitching of her ears towards the end, which came from either emotion or an itch, and I suspect the former. When I had finished she asked me simply, without any comment, if I had told anyone else. And when I said I hadn’t she looked relieved and said, ‘Good. Good girl. The fewer the better. Just in case we have to… you know…’

I knew exactly: my secret was safe in her hands, but her hands were tough and workmanlike and would deal with things if necessary in a tough and workmanlike way. This is probably why I found myself arguing so passionately in favour of finishing my written story and not destroying it afterwards, the way Aunt Lujanta insisted I should: I was defending the survival of something more than just a pile of papers.

‘No good keeping our mouths shut if you’re going to put it all down in a book,’ she pointed out, unmoved by my appeal. ‘Books are like pickles, they keep. And anyone can dip into them at any time.’

‘But what if we hide the book,’ I pleaded. ‘Hide it properly, somewhere safe, so it remains hidden for ages, the way I intended when I started writing. There’s history, you know, inside these covers. There isn’t just any old made up story, there’s facts, there’s knowledge. If I’d had my grandmother Alexa’s book to dip into when I felt like it, I almost certainly wouldn’t be in the plight I’m in now. Think of that turning of the medal… almost the very same words: ‘Look, Highness, on one side the head of a man, and on the other the image of a she-wolf. Two different faces but only the one medal.’ Why, I’d have known in a trice; I’d have recognised him; I’d have been able to defend myself.’

The argument was sound but I think it was the magic word ‘History’ that did the trick: like all Salvans Aunt Lulu is impressed to the marrow by anything that smacks of learning. ‘Very well, picera,’ she said after a longish think (overlooking the fact that I am hardly picera any more). ‘I suppose there’s no harm in your finishing the last few chapters, not now you’ve got so far. But remember to keep the manuscript locked away when you’re not working on it. And remember, when the time comes,’ and she turned away, trying to make the words sound careless so as not to scare me, ‘remember to tell me where you put the key.’

So, having saved at least one thing that is dear to me, at least for the time being, here I go with the next chapter.


CHAPTER FOUR

Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.

However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.

So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.

Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.

And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.

At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.

In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.

And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.

This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.

‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’

I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’

I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’

The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.

‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’

I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’

I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’

Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’

I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’

He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’

Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’

His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’

This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’

Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.

His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.

‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’

What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’

Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.

‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’

I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.

We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’

Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’

I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.

Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’

I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’

‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’







CHAPTER FOUR



Lidsanel. Lidsanel was tall and strong and quite the most beautiful person I have ever seen. Or animal too for that matter. Or plant. Or stone. (Except perhaps for the Raietta, which is truly breathtaking when held against the light.) He was kind as well, and thoughtful, and could say all sorts of interesting things once he felt at ease with the person he was talking to. But I have to admit in all fairness that he was not very quick at catching meanings or passing from one subject to another, and had in fact gained the reputation among the rest of the tribe of being thick as a peat clod.

However, he and I suited one another to perfection: quick people fluster me, they always did. And like a pair of dray dogs or horses that are shown off to more than double the advantage when they are well matched (and who better matched than we?), we seemed to thrive in each other’s company: me taking on some of Lidsanel’s health and strength and gloss, and he becoming more confident, more talkative, and carrying his head higher and growing brisker over fiddly things like using the counting frame and tying knots.

So after a while, instead of tuning aside and whispering as they did to begin with, tapping their foreheads and making other signs I won’t mention, people began smiling in an open, friendly fashion when they saw us together. Smiling and nodding and calling out crude but well-meant remarks such as, ‘Cuddling time at last, eh, Mara!’ and, ‘Hiya, Cafusc! Mind the cobwebs!’ and, ‘Big filly needs a big rider!’ It was their way of saying that they approved the match.

Those were happy times, so happy that nothing can really blight them for me in hindsight or make me wish them unlived. Nothing? No, nothing. The memory of them, like an ember-pan in a winter bed, burns a patch of warmth inside me even today. I got stronger and stronger and my illness got weaker and weaker until it just trickled away and disappeared altogether. My hair grew thick again, my headaches stopped, my appetite came back. Every morning (as if the sandbag was behind me now, so to speak, knocking me forward) I would leave my bed with a bounce, I was so eager to begin the day. No matter what it held. Bookwork, bargaining, listening to grumbles – all the things I had so dreaded before held no fears for me now. I enjoyed everything, because everything took place either in Lidsanel’s presence (in which case we were together and I had nothing more to ask for), or else in his absence (in which case I could look forward to our being together soon). Between these alternatives there was simply no space for sadness or worry of any kind.

And yet worry eventually came, and from quite an unexpected quarter. As the time for our wedding drew near I began to notice a change in Lidsanel that I just could not for the life of me understand. He who was candour itself, whose cobalt blue eyes I could peer into as if gazing into a mountain lake and see nothing but clearness, clearness all the way, gradually became – I could never say cold or shifty, but sort of reserved with me, evasive. He never spoke much, but now he hardly spoke at all. And when he did it was to utter sour, impatient things like, ‘Leave off, Mara,’ or, ‘Let me alone, I’m not in the vein,’ or, ‘What do you mean, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s as smooth as a hedgehog’s ruddy hindpiece.’ Even his posture changed: he began stooping again and hanging his head, looking for preference at the ground.

At first I was hurt and drew back a little on my own account, thinking or at any rate fearing that he no longer loved me. Then, when I saw that his reserve belonged only to the daytime, and that at night he sought me out more fiercely than ever before and clung to me like a burr and moaned strange choking sounds into the back of my neck, I thought, odd though it seemed, it might be the other way round: that it was he who doubted my love.

In actual fact, as I discovered after much questioning (unearthing things is after all a Miners’ speciality), it had nothing to do with love at all. It concerned Tarlui and had to do with dislike, distrust, disloyalty and, perhaps heaviest of all for an openhearted person like Lidsanel to bear, with shame. In Lidsanel’s telling, the story was long and complicated because he kept going backwards and forwards in time and then grinding to a halt and having to be coaxed on again, but I think I can make quick work of it. The kernel of the matter was simply this: when Lidsanel and Tarlui first came to camp outside out gate all those many years ago, it had been in order to steal our gold from us. They had come as thieves. They had always, Lidsanel said, been thieves, as far back as he could remember. That is, Tarlui had been organizer thief and teacher thief, and he, Lidsanel, being smaller and nimbler, had been the actual snitcher.

And please, I was not to gape at him like that. He had seen no harm in it then; on the contrary, it had been his duty and Tarlui had used to beat the daylights out of him every time he failed to perform it. Which in Mill Brook luckily hadn’t happened often because stealing was so easy: only once had he gone back to Tarlui empty-handed, and that had been when for want of strength he had failed to break open the lock on the chest that contained the gold.

This pilfering life of theirs had gone on quite a while, right up to the completion of the walls and the posting of the guards, after which it had become too risky. I would probably remember some of the things that went missing. (No probably about it. My snake bracelet that Odolghes gave me. All those bantams. Jet’s pretty agate ring.) Then had come the Fever outbreak; he and Tarlui had left their shack and come to live inside the walls; and suddenly, without explanation, he had started receiving beatings for the opposite reason: slash, slash across the eyes with a switch every time he nicked something. So he had stopped stealing and had joined the other children at their lessons instead, and then gone on to be a worker, and in time had almost forgotten that he’d ever been a thief or a thief’s son. But he had never forgotten the beatings.

‘I grew to hate him, you see,’ Lidsanel confessed at this point, speaking in a harsh, bitter voice I barely recognized. ‘And it is a terrible, fateful thing to hate your own father. I hate him still. I hate his skin and I hate his innards, and I hate belonging to him and owing him obedience. I almost hate myself for being his son.’

I didn’t want to look shocked by this revelation, but I was. To tell the truth I hardly knew which shocked me more: the stealing in the past and Tarlui’s cruelty, or Lidsanel’s outburst now. For an instant the image flashed across my mind of a doll Jet and I had found lying in the woods when we were children. It was a beautiful doll, all made of wool, with a red woollen dress and long black looped-up skeins of hair, but when we picked it up and turned it over we discovered in the nether side, to our disgust, a nest of naked baby mice. On that occasion I had screamed and thrown the doll into the bushes: now, with so much more to lose, I knew I must be more careful. Gently I asked Lidsanel if he didn’t think he was being a bit childish with all this talk of hatred. The things he spoke of had taken place many years ago now, at a time when his father was probably hard put to find enough food to keep them both alive. Hence the stealing and hence the bursts of evil temper. Hadn’t Tarlui changed since he’d settled in Mill Brook and become our doctor? Surely he had, and surely he could be forgiven? And as for belonging – once we were married Lidsanel would belong to no one any more, except possibly me, and would owe no one any obedience. ‘You will soon be free of you father altogether,’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, as my husband you will be above him, and you can give him orders rather than the other way round.’

I ended on a laugh, but Lidsanel’s voice when he answered was still bitterly sad. ‘Oh Mara,’ he said. ‘Free of him? Me give him orders? Oh Mara mine, you have no idea. You say he has changed. I thought so too. But he hasn’t, he is still a thief, and still rotten as carrion inside. And please,’ he added, bitterer still, ‘don’t keep calling him my father; his name is Tarlui.’

The way he spoke almost scared me, and the choice of word did too: carrion. ‘How can you know these things with such certainty?’ I asked.

‘Because…’ He put his head in his hands, and with a gesture that filled me with sudden and unexplained tenderness began tapping it, quite hard, first on one side and then on the other, as if the words needed dislodging before they could leave his mouth. ‘Because… Because he told me so. Because he thought I was still a thief too, and he told me so. That day, you remember, when you were so ill, and I kissed your hand and we sort of… you know… for the first time…’

I knew the day he meant all right. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, afterwards…’ He hesitated again, let go his head and clutched urgently at one of my hands instead. ‘I swear, Mara, I hadn’t said anything to make him think I felt that way. You must believe me. Promise you believe me.’

I believed him; that was not the trouble. ‘I promise.’

Relief seemed to loosen his voice, because the words came out fast now. ‘Well, afterwards, as we were walking back to our hut, he suddenly prodded me in the ribs with that bony elbow of his and laughed out loud and said how clever I was under all my brawn, and how he’d always known I’d come in useful sooner or later, and how right he’d been to give me the benefit of the doubt. ‘It’s an old hen makes the best broth, eh?’ he said. And then he made a clucking noise. ‘Well, we’ll boil this one together nice and slowly till we get all the juice out of her, eh, Lidsanel? All the precious golden juice.’ That is what he said.’

I swallowed and was silent, grappling with the meaning of the words long after they had been spoken. This was worse than the doll with the mouse nest; it was worse than I could ever have imagined. No wonder Lidsanel had been so strange of late. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye. His own father still planning to steal our gold from us – from friends, from people who had taken him in and given him work and fed him and housed him for all these years. Such deviousness hardly bore thinking about. And I who had appointed the man as our doctor and had even thought of making him my private counsellor… Brrh! Vanity I suppose, but it was his calling me an ‘old hen’ that hurt the most. ‘And you?’ I asked Lidsanel at last, hardly daring to trust my voice, which indeed came out in a funny gulp. ‘What did you say?’

He looked straight at me and, thank goodness, his eyes were clear now. ‘I laughed too,’ he said simply, turning a russet tinge about the cheekbones. ‘I thought he was just being… you know, the way people are with lovers. I didn’t catch his meaning properly, not until a month or so ago when he suddenly came forward with this little bag in his hand and asked me if I would please go through your clothes the next time you and I were together and find out where you kept the Miners’ magic stone, and then pop it in the bag and bring it back to him without breathing a word. He said it’d make a good start, a nice little golden nest egg for breakfast.’

Oh sacred spiders down my spine! Tarlui was an outsider; he wasn’t supposed to know anything about the stone. How had he found out about it? Who had told him? And what did he want it for when he wasn’t a Miner? Who did he want it for? For the first and I think only time Lidsanel’s slowness got on my nerves. ‘So then what did you do?’ I snapped at him. ‘Laugh again?’

His face was russet all over now but he still didn’t blink or look away, even when he shook his head in denial. ‘Then I told him,’ he said. ‘I told him to shut his evil mouth, and that I loved you and you loved me and we were getting married for that reason and that reason only, so there. And if he ever so much as mentioned stealing again, or gold, or hens or eggs or broth or broilers or anything of the kind, I would take this stone he was so keen to get his hands on and ram the wretched thing down his throat until he choked on it.’

This was better. ‘And what did he say to that?’

Lidsanel laughed, inasmuch as he made a dry snorting noise. ‘What could he say? He backed down of course. Said I’d misunderstood him, that he’d only been joking, that he’d known all along my feelings for you were serious, and he’d only been having his little tease; in reality he was proud as a pigeon to learn that a son of his was to become the husband of such a fine, high-born lady as yourself. What use was gold to him anyway, he said, now that he was a doctor? Just as long as he had a tiny medicinal lump of the stuff to rub on sties. And gabble, gabble, on like that, trying to convince me. But he was lying, Mara. He’d made a mistake – it was he who had misunderstood me, not the other way round – and he was trying to lie his way out of the muddle. Trying to smooth over the crack; put his mask back in place before I noticed.

His mask? Oh, no! I thought of the taut white skin of Tarlui’s forehead and the difficulty I had always had in knowing what was going on behind it. So that was it: he wore a mask, he covered his face with a mask.

‘Not a real mask, silly,’ Lidsanel said. And then he stopped and looked at me with a strange baffled expression. ‘No, no, it can’t be,’ he went on, shaking his head. ‘No. What am I thinking? No, it’s impossible. Impossible.’

What was impossible? What? What? I could have no peace until Lidsanel had explained.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s just that ever since I’ve shared a hut with Tarlui I’ve noticed that – oh, what would it be? – roughly once every new moon, perhaps a bit more often, he curtains off his side of the hut so that I can’t see what’s going on and fiddles around behind the curtain with his bottles and phials and things until far into the night. What he’s doing I have no idea, but I can hear him stirring things and mixing and rubbing, and I’ve always had a feeling he’s altering his appearance in some way. Because he looks sort of different afterwards. Different and yet the same, if you know what I mean. So when you mentioned masks…’

Oh dear. I was getting more and more nervous. ‘But didn’t you ever look behind the curtain?’ I asked.

‘I tried,’ Lidsanel said. ‘Once, when I was little. Just a peep. But he saw me and threw some stinging liquid in my eyes. It blinded me for three whole days. I never tried again.’

I don’t know why, when the episode had taken place so long ago, but I felt panic rising in my throat – in waves, the way sick does. I leant forward and pressed myself against Lidsanel, closing his arms about me with my own. I tried to calm myself with reason, telling myself that if Tarlui had wanted to bring harm to the Miners he would have acted differently; he would never have saved us from the Fever, for a start, nor agreed to become our doctor, nor treated our ills, nor dressed our wounds, nor cured me from my last illness, just to mention a few of the good things he had done. But reason was powerless, and the waves kept on coming.

We stood like that for some time, wrapped round each other, not speaking. ‘And the business about stealing the stone?’ I asked after a while in a whisper. ‘Did Tarlui realize you didn’t believe him when he said it was just a joke? Did you tell him so? Did you let your disbelief show?’

Lidsanel hugged me tighter. ‘I’m not that stupid,’ he said. ‘Leastways I’m clever enough to go on looking stupid when stupid’s the best thing to look. No, I don’t think he noticed, in fact I’m sure he didn’t. Why, what were you thinking?’

I was thinking all sorts of things. First, that I ought to tell Tusky, or Bruno, or someone else trustworthy, that we had a thief in our midst nosing around after the stone. Second, that if I did tell anyone, no matter how trustworthy, Lidsanel and I could no longer marry, and this I could not bear. Third, that for this reason Lidsanel and I would do well to deal with this matter alone, just the two of us. And fourth that in order to do this we must find out all we could about Tarlui’s intentions. We must discover, that is, whether he still intended to go ahead and steal the stone now that he had no assistant to help him. And if he did, as Lidsanel thought was almost certain, we must discover in what way and when, and how to stop him. And we must also discover, in so far as this was possible, if we did stop him what he would do to us in revenge. What he would do and what he could do.

Lidsanel was gloomy on this last point. ‘His worst,’ he said. ‘He’ll do his worst. If we interfere with his plans you can bet the stone and the crown and every speck of gold in the store he’ll interfere with ours.’

I was sure Lidsanel was right about this but I was equally sure, once I had thought it out carefully, that the worst Tarlui could do (apart from stopping the marriage, which we must avoid at all costs by bringing forward the date) would be to reveal to the rest of the tribe Lidsanel’s past as a thief – this being, so I foolishly thought, our only guilty secret and our only weak spot. Should this happen, I would have to step down from the throne and hand the chieftainship over to Tusky. Who had longed for it always and would be delighted. ‘And then you and I,’ I pointed out to Lidsanel, ‘would be free to live like ordinary people. We could either go on living here or else, if the Miners didn’t want us any more, we could take to the woods with a couple of packs on our backs like I did once with my father. We could go anywhere, live anywhere. That’s the worst thing that can happen, to my mind, and it wouldn’t be too bad, would it?’

‘Oh Mara,’ Lidsanel said again in that sad, beaten voice. ‘Oh Mara, if only it were so.’ Then, with a sudden change, a sudden brightening, ‘I know. Why don’t we go now while we still have the chance? Quick, I beg of you. No plans, no packs. Let’s leave everything behind us and just take to the woods and run.’

(Chapter 5 coming up next sunday, 25 july 2010)